A Willing Victim (11 page)

‘That’s right. Michael. We’re educating him here.’ As she gazed at him in her rapt, intense way, it occurred to Stratton that she
had more of the child about her than the boy had. He, Stratton thought, was not so much young, as
new
. ‘How wonderful,’ gushed Miss Kirkland, ‘that you were able to meet him.’

Stratton raised his eyebrows. ‘But the man – the teacher – didn’t call him Michael.’

‘Yes . . . Maitreya. It’s a mark of respect.’

‘Some sort of title, you mean?’

‘Well . . .’ Miss Kirkland frowned, caught on the horns of an inner dilemma that Stratton imagined must have something to do with an injunction from Roth about not discussing things too much with the uninitiated. ‘Maitreya means a spiritually advanced being – a master of ancient wisdom. When he grows up, Michael will be a great teacher . . .’ She hesitated, and then, apparently unable to stop herself, said, ‘A teacher such as Buddha, or Jesus.’

‘Without the immaculate conception, I presume?’ asked Stratton, flippantly.

He expected a rebuke or at least an indulgent, all-knowing smile from Miss Kirkland, but got instead a deeper frown that crenellated her entire forehead. He had the distinct impression that she was genuinely at a loss to know how to answer him. Eventually, she gave a little cough, said sharply that it was not a suitable subject for discussion, and beat a hasty retreat into the house.

Stratton stared after her. She can’t
really
believe he’s the product of virgin birth, he thought. Then again – as he very well knew – there was no limit to what people would believe. The boy was just an ordinary kid – except that he obviously didn’t live like one, and what he’d said to Stratton about the burden of guilt hadn’t exactly been ordinary, had it? Then again, if everyone expected him to come out with things like that all the time, perhaps he’d just got into the habit of it. But he’d been right, hadn’t he? Stratton did feel guilty. He’d felt guilty – in varying
degrees, admittedly, but it was always there – ever since Jenny had died. Was it so easy to spot? Or did the boy use some sort of technique like that of a medium giving a ‘cold’ reading, feeling his way from vague assertions to something more concrete by studying his subject for silent clues? If that were the case, then he had it down to a fine art.

All the same, it was bloody odd. Presumably it was Roth who’d marked Michael out as ‘great teacher’ material, Stratton thought, scribbling notes, and, going by what had just happened, the kid must think so himself – or perhaps he just had a strong inclination to self-dramatisation. That sort of thing would be enough to give anyone a superiority complex.

As Adlard drove to the pub in Lincott where he’d arranged to meet Ballard and stay for the night, Stratton wondered what age Michael had been when Roth had come to this conclusion. It was, he supposed, fairly recent. Vague memories of lessons at Sunday school reminded him that Jesus had been twelve when he stayed behind in the temple in Jerusalem to talk to the people there and amaze them.

Stratton stared out at the trees and fields, greying and softening in the dusk, and wondered what Jeremy Lloyd, who believed himself marked out for greatness, had thought about Michael.

Stratton took a pull on his pint and sighed appreciatively. The George and Dragon looked the part, all right. Thatched, with wooden beams, worn flagstones and a roaring fire, it was empty but for himself, an old man in one corner, his skin cross-wrinkled by years of outdoor work to resemble the neck of a tortoise, and the landlord who stood behind the long bar, hands resting wide apart on the polished wood in the attitude of a priest. This aside, he looked the part as much as his pub did: corpulent and ruddy, with a flamboyant moustache and a scarlet handkerchief spilling from his jacket pocket. The sort, Stratton thought, who was accustomed to pouring out tall stories as easily as pints, with an equal amount of froth. ‘Denton,’ the man boomed, by way of introduction. ‘Call me George. And this,’ he gestured towards his wife, small, grey and clad in beige, who had just entered with Stratton’s sandwiches, ‘is the Dragon.’ Mrs Denton, who’d obviously heard this many times before, smiled wanly. ‘Otherwise known as Maisie. She’ll look after you.’

‘Stratton,’ said Stratton, adding ‘thank you,’ to Maisie Denton, who bobbed her head in acknowledgement before scooting back to the kitchen.

Denton held up a large hand as though conferring a blessing, before holding it out to be shaken. ‘A warm welcome to you.’ He
gave Stratton a cheerfully calculating look – Albert Pierrepoint guessing his weight – before saying, ‘Business or pleasure?’

‘Business, I’m afraid.’

‘Thought so. I saw the car. You with the police, are you?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Just come from the rectory, have you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Joe there’ – Denton gestured at the man in the corner, in the manner of someone hailing a taxi – ‘spotted you on his way over.’

‘Quite a bush telegraph, then.’

‘Oh, yes. Anything happens, we’ll hear about it sooner or later.’

‘In that case,’ Stratton produced the photograph from his pocket, ‘can you tell me about her?’

Denton looked at the picture, raised his eyebrows, and mimed a whistle. ‘Oh, yes. I can tell you about
her
all right. She was married to the old vicar, Reverend Milburn. Doesn’t look like a vicar’s wife, does she? Didn’t behave like one, either, by all accounts. Makes me think of Tommy Trinder.’ Here, he drew his hand down his chin as if to elongate it, and gave a passable imitation of the comedian’s leering smile. ‘“Beautiful girl, they call her Nescafé . . . She’s so easy to make!” Man mad, she was. Never tried it on with me, mind . . .’ Here his glance flicked in the direction of the kitchen. ‘More’s the pity. She was quite something, I can tell you. What you might call a piece of work, though.’ Glancing round, Stratton saw that old Joe, in his corner, was all ears and nodding in vigorous agreement. ‘In trouble, is she?’

‘Nothing like that. But we do need to speak to her.’

‘She not at the rectory? We heard she’d come back to live there. Not that I’ve seen her – you won’t catch any of that lot in here.’

‘Oh?’

Denton shrugged. ‘I suppose it’s against their religion – whatever that’s supposed to be. Mind you, if a bit of the other’ – he
gave Stratton a conspiratorial leer – ‘isn’t on the cards either, I don’t suppose she’d be likely to stay around too long.’

‘But she lived at Lincott Rectory when it had the reputation of being haunted?’

‘That’s right. And there’s a lot round here who’ll tell you that was her doing, as well.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘There’s ways of faking these things.’ Denton nodded sagely. ‘She’d come up with these tales of things flying across the room and mysterious figures floating round the garden. Old Joe there, his sister-in-law Ivy used to work in the kitchen. Told me it used to frighten her to death, saucepans tumbling off the shelves, bells ringing, dirty words appearing on the walls, pins put on her chair . . . Lot of nasty tricks.’

‘Sounds like something a child might do.’

‘Exactly – easy enough to set up – and the place had a name for it before, didn’t it?’

‘Did it?’

‘Oh, yes. There was a nunnery there originally. Medieval times, I think – all gone now, of course. There’s all sorts of tales about that: a girl who’d been locked up because she wouldn’t marry the man her father wanted, so she took her own life, and a nun who’d fallen in love with some farmer’s son and was planning to run away with him, only she got killed when he lost control of his horse . . . Mrs Milburn claimed she’d seen them both, and the chap on horseback. All nonsense, although you’d probably find one or two in the village who still believe it. Mind you, all that old stuff was more or less forgotten until the Milburns came, but after it all started again we had men from the newspapers, trippers, the lot. She wrote to the papers, you see, and there was this chap who made a business of investigating ghosts and mediums – Maurice Hill, his name was – and one of the papers gave him a lot of money to come and write about it.’

‘When was that?’ asked Stratton.

‘Couple of years before the war.’ The photograph must have been older than he’d originally assumed, thought Stratton.

‘Hold up,’ said Denton, reaching beneath the bar to retrieve a shoebox. When he lifted the lid, Stratton saw a pile of newspaper cuttings. The topmost had a headline that read
SÉANCE HELD IN HAUNTED HOUSE. MYSTERIOUS RAPPINGS IN THE RECTORY OF LINCOTT.
It was dated 15 June 1938. ‘They came here about a year before that,’ he said. ‘She didn’t lose any time and of course, she got her picture in the papers as well . . . Some said she and Hill were carrying on and they were in it together. Wouldn’t surprise me if they had been. I mean, look at it from his point of view.’ He spread his hands in a gesture of open-mindedness. ‘He’d spent all his life showing how ghosts don’t exist and how mediums are tricking people, but if he could show that a ghost
did
exist, well, that’s a much better story, isn’t it?’ Denton paused to swipe at his nose with his scarlet handkerchief, ‘I didn’t do so badly out of it, either. Hordes of sightseers – me and the missus were run off our feet. Almost as good as the war, it was. Do you know, half the time those GIs just left their change on the bar, couldn’t be bothered with it, so—’

Realising that this could go on for some time, Stratton said, ‘What about the Reverend Milburn?’

‘That was a funny old thing . . .’ George shook his head. ‘We all read these accounts in the papers, and it was always her saying she’d seen these things flying about, not him. He said things about having pins placed on his chair and belongings not being where he’d put them – she could have been doing that easy, same as the pans falling off the shelves in the kitchen and scaring poor old Ivy. No one really knew how Reverend Milburn felt about it. I remember some story about him dousing the place in holy water, but that could have been because the dean told him to – the dean and the bishop didn’t like it at all, you see. Sensational,
they said. Gave the church a bad name. But Reverend Milburn, well . . . He was a lot older than she was. Sixty if he was a day. They’d married when she was very young – not much more than a schoolgirl – and frankly, he wasn’t too well when he came here. I’m not a churchgoer myself, but the wife goes along—’ He broke off and, leaning through the doorway to the kitchen, bellowed, ‘Maisie!’

Mrs Denton appeared, looking resigned and wiping her hands on her apron. ‘Come here a minute, love.’ Denton put an arm round her thin shoulder. ‘Mr Stratton’s asking about Reverend Milburn, what he was like in church.’

‘I don’t know what stories George has been telling you . . .’ Maisie Denton frowned at her husband.

‘It’s all right, love,’ said Denton, instantly placatory. ‘Mr Stratton is a policeman.’ Seeing her look of alarm, he patted her with a huge paw and said, ‘There’s nothing wrong. He just wants to know about the Milburns, that’s all.’

‘Well, I suppose it’s all right,’ said Maisie, sounding doubtful. ‘One thing I will say: his sermons were always very moral. A lot of talk about sin. Everything he saw was sin, and he was always very hot on that.’ To Stratton’s astonishment, a sweetly mischievous smile lit up her face. ‘A bit surprising when you consider the way Mrs Milburn used to carry on. I felt a bit sorry for him, really, the way people used to talk about the pair of them behind their backs . . . And you could see he wasn’t well. He used to get muddled, forget what he was talking about halfway through the sermon. A bit bumbling, really, and it got worse over the years so you never knew what you were going to hear next. And then when he collapsed in the pulpit . . . I’ll never forget it. A couple of the choir carried him through to the vestry and there he was, laid out, with his head propped up on a hassock while they fetched the doctor. He’d had a stroke – we all thought it would kill him, but it didn’t. He retired after that, though, and the pair
of them moved away. I did hear that he’d died, but I don’t know where or when it happened.’

‘What was he like when he wasn’t in church?’

Maisie Denton screwed up her face in thought, then said, ‘Do you know, I couldn’t really say. He kept himself to himself – we never really saw him out much, which is a bit unusual in a place like this. I think he was too ill to do much visiting in the parish. You know, I always thought he liked doing the burials best. Much better than marriages. I suppose that must have been because of Mrs Milburn.’

‘What did you think of her?’

‘Well . . .’

Seeing his wife hesitate, Denton said, ‘Not much, is the answer. None of the women here liked her. Didn’t trust her near their husbands.’

‘There was a bit of that,’ admitted Maisie. ‘Jealousy, really. Because she was nice-looking –
fancy
-looking, if you know what I mean. A bit flashy. Well, maybe not for London, but for here . . . always seemed to have new clothes . . . And you did hear a lot of stories – but I don’t know how true they were.’

‘And these lovers she was supposed to have had – was that just gossip?’

‘Well . . .’ Maisie flushed. ‘There was certainly plenty of talk about that journalist or psychic investigator, or whatever he was supposed to be.’

‘What about Ambrose Tynan?’ asked Stratton.

Maisie shook her head. ‘He wasn’t here then.’

‘Came just after the war ended,’ boomed Denton. ‘Down from London, although I did hear he had a place over at Otley, as well.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Village near Woodbridge. About forty miles, by road.’

‘Mrs Milburn had other visitors, too,’ Maisie put in, ‘men from London—’

‘Shouldn’t be surprised if some of them had been in on the haunting business as well,’ Denton interrupted.

‘But the vicar would have been present, wouldn’t he?’ asked Stratton. ‘If these visitors were staying in the rectory.’

‘Well, yes,’ said Denton, ‘but he was getting very doddery by then, and she’d got him right under her thumb, so . . . Perhaps he was afraid she’d up and leave him in his old age if he made a fuss about the other chaps. The fact is,’ he added judiciously, ‘we don’t really know what was going on. Stand behind a bar long enough and you’ll hear stranger things than that, though . . .’